Iron

Iron is more difficult to form into metal than copper or bronze, because it needs a much hotter fire
and a more complicated process, but it is much more useful
than copper or bronze as well.

On the left there's an Ancient
Greek vase showing a blacksmith
heating up iron while a younger boy works the bellows to blow the fire hot enough. Below, there's a video of a blacksmith making something out of iron. First he
heats up the metal so it will get softer, and then he beats it into shape with a hammer.

Because iron is so hard to make, nobody
used iron before about 1500 BC. Then the
Hittites in West Asia did learn how to use it. But they quickly saw that iron weapons
were better than bronze ones, and so they decided not to tell anybody
else how to make iron. The Hittites kept the secret of making iron for
about 400 years, until about 1100 BC, but when the Dark
Ages came to West Asia, the Hittite
empire fell apart anyway, and the secret of making iron got out
to other people.

When the Aryans
invaded India, around 800 BC, they brought the knowledge of how
to make iron with them there. People who lived in China learned how
to make iron by around 700 or 600 BC, during the Eastern
Chou dynasty.

By about 300 AD, people
in West Africa and East
Africa had also learned the secrets of making iron. Some people
think they learned how from the Egyptians;
other people think the Africans figured it out on their own.

Each culture brought their own new ideas to the use of iron. In India, for instance, by the 1000s AD architects were making iron beams to hold up the roofs of big temples.

Read more about the history of iron and steel:

Kidipede - History and Science for Kids is an award-winning website for middle school written and published since 1995 by Dr. K.E. Carr, Professor Emerita, Department of History, Portland State University.

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